Last week, Blizzard announced tons of new information about the upcoming Gnomeregan and Echo Isles instances that we expect to see in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, the next major expansion pack to the game. Among them are the fact that the gnomes and the trolls will both have an opportunity in the coming expansion to take their respective homelands back. Nethaera said on the official forums:

High Tinker Mekkatorque, betrayed by Mekgineer Thermaplugg and forced to flee the irradiated city of Gnomeregan with the few of his fellow gnomes who managed to survive, is preparing to reclaim his once glorious city. Meanwhile, in distant Durotar, Vol’jin of the Darkspear trolls is determined to exact revenge upon the witch doctor Zalazane for dividing the Darkspears and seizing the land bestowed to them by Thrall: the Echo Isles. Read more about the ongoing struggles of the gnomes and the trolls… and their plans to seek redemption.

There are already a number of spoilers floating around out there since a lot of the audio data and text have already started to appear in existing data packs and folks who are familiar with sites that do a lot of data mining may already have seen the content of the events and encounters.

What do you think? Are you looking forward to the opportunity to hand Thermaplugg and Zalazane their marching orders and tell them to get the heck out of your character’s homeland? It’s been said that everything is going to change in Cataclysm, and this certainly looks like the beginning of that.

According to the patch 3.3.3 notes on the PTR, there are some interesting new statistics that Blizzard is going to start recording about our collective participation in the dungeon finder, including the number of times you’ve been kicked from a dungeon that was started using the finder, the number of times you voted to kick someone but didn’t initiate the kick-vote, the number of times you initiated the kick-vote, the number of times you abandoned an LFG dungeon, and the number of completed LFG dungeons you’ve been in.

Now don’t get me wrong, this could very well be all about some new achievements, especially the number of times you’ve completed an LFG dungeon, but the rest of the stats may be the beginnings of Blizzard responding to some of the complaints about people abusing the dungeon finder and generally being nuisances when using it. I don’t know what Blizzard may do about any systemic abuses of the system, but it’s encouraging that they’re at least looking.

What do you think Blizzard is going to do with the data? Let us know in the comments!